A NEW work of art by Kelpies artist Andy Scott harks back to Lanarkshire's past as the heartland of Scottish steel-making.

Get weekly news by email

The biggest hot-strip steel mill in Europe – a living breathing version of Dante’s inferno.

Before Margaret Thatcher and her successors’ housekeeping extinguished the furnaces at Ravenscraig, Motherwell was Steelopolis.

The giant plant turned the sky orange at night as workers battled to keep up with the demands of a rapidly developing world fuelled by steam, gas and electricity and geared up to service motor cars, ocean liners, trains and planes.

Now, 23 years after British Steel pulled out – leaving a huge derelict crater and a shell-shocked community looking for work – a memorial to those lost in the industry is to be placed on the site.

The man commissioned to produce a lasting tribute to the thousands of men who died making Britain’s iron and steel – including hundreds of Scots – is Glasgow artist Andy Scott .

Scott, 51, is best known for designing the Kelpies, the huge horse structures that stand proud in Falkirk.

And when a committee of former steelworkers decided to commemorate comrades who gave their lives, he was an obvious choice.

He has spent years harnessing the raw material these men processed every day, including the 600 tons channelled into the epic beasts that tower 30metres over the Helix Park in Falkirk.

Scott is putting the finishing touches to his new work Steel Man after countless hours of research and sketches to come up with an appropriate image.

He works out of a canalside studio in north Glasgow – aptly a former ironworks.

As well as designing the latest creation, he has had to work with haulage contractors, wrestling with plans to transport the sculpture.

It will be sited outside Ravenscraig sports centre, at the heart of plans for a new town which have been put on hold until the economy improves.

The sculpture is impressive, knitting the past into the future and drawing on rich local knowledge about a plant which employed up to 15,000 workers at it peak and occupied twice the land area of Monaco.

The mammoth creation of a steel worker with a waterfall of molten steel pouring from his hands has presented something of a challenge to the haulage firm Scott has been liaising with.

It is too big to lift using Scott’s own standard forklift and chains so the haulage company will bring their Hiab crane truck directly into the workshop.

After that, it will be transported to the galvanising company where it will be coated before the inauguration on June 17.

Scott is not fazed, saying: “It’s all part of the job, figuring out how to get it from A to B.

“I am 100 per cent involved in this side of things. You become accustomed to cranes and trucks. When it gets to this stage, you have to have an awareness of these other disciplines – it’s not all about the aesthetics and form.”

The commissioning team from Ravenscraig approached Scott three years ago with their vision, which was very specific.

And they hope it will reawaken interest about something now lost to history for a new generation.

Scott said: “I wanted to create a typical steel worker to epitomise all trades and industries. My version is quite contemporary.

“In the old days there was no such thing as health and safety. Men would go to work in these places wearing flat caps and dungarees.

“But I have deliberately clad him in heavy duty protective clothing with a visor and helmet.”

Scott added: “I wanted to convey the flow of the steel from the giant vats and ladles used in the industry, which represented such health hazards over the years. It is symbolic of men and steel and industry.

“There is a tremendous poignancy and sadness surrounding the fact that we don’t have the industry any more.

“It’s important that we have some kind of memorial to commemorate the sense of pride these men had in their work.

“They engaged in a battle with the elements and forces of nature to create steel and the industrial might of this country. They certainly put in the effort.”

John Scott, who began working as an apprentice plater for a firm near Ravenscraig as a teenager – and whose uncle died in an industrial accident at the plant – said: “This statue totally depicts the image we wanted.

“It is a statue of a man rather than an image of steel-making. It was the men who made the industry and we are delighted.”

John recalls how intimidating working at the plant could be.

He said: “It could be terrifying coming out of a classroom and into this. It was a very bleak place, noisy, dirty and hazardous. The only way you could really describe it is as a different planet.

“When we went to do our apprenticeships, we were told, ‘It’s not if you have an accident but when.’

“Everyone was expected to have one, it was hard manual grind. At the end of the day, we would be black. Steel got in our hair and was ingrained in our hands. The industry aged people. When you got to retirement age you were done.”

Of his uncle’s death, John said: “My grandmother never recovered from it. These were horrible, horrible deaths, and if you think of the huge size of the engineering works that were there, when something went wrong, it went wrong in a big way. People lost grandparents, next-door neighbours, fathers brothers.

Poll loading …

“We are talking thousands of people here and compensation was nothing like what you might get today.

“We love the way that Andy has created a molten river. The flow of steel-making was all about water and molten metal that moved. You are not sure if it is falling from steam or clouds. It is a work of love and we are delighted with it.”

Tommy Brennan, a union convener at Ravenscraig for 18 years, said: “When I first went into the industry in 1947, safety practices were non-existent.

“The figure for the deaths of workers caused by accidents in the whole of the UK just in my union – the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation – was 2223.

“But remember, that was just for my union. There were about eight or nine unions.

“When the new starts would come in on a Monday we would warn them, ‘When you go down here into this plant, it will be totally different from anything you have ever seen before.’”

Tommy says health and safety did improve over the decades but there was always some element of risk. When accidents happened, the industrial padre would be called upon but there was no counselling as such.

Scott has been sensitive to these facts.

He also underplays comparisons of his work with this kind of graft, saying: “I am chopping up little bits of steel on my 60-ton guillotine. They were dealing with thousands of tons. It’s nothing compared to what they were doing.”

Brennan is thrilled with the memorial.

He said: “Before the steel industry in Scotland disappears completely, we needed to do something as a way of representing Lanarkshire in better times.”

For Scott, his work to translate the energy of his predecessors into our collective memory goes on.

He says he is coming to the end of another equine commission and about to begin working now on a major new project that is somewhat hush hush.

Another project in Poland is on the horizon.

But first a short holiday to take a breath before Steel Man makes his public debut to mend a broken landscape.